79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation.

by Chad Wellmon

Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter-thesis, and a string of arguments, usually buttressed by citations of Aristotle, Augustine, or the Bible.

But disputations were not just formal arguments. They were public performances that trained university students in how to seek and argue for the truth. They made demands on students and masters alike. Truth was hard won; it was to be found in multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions; it required one to give and recognize arguments; and, perhaps above all, it demanded an epistemic humility, an acknowledgment that truth was something sought, not something produced.

It is, then, in this spirit that Jacobs offers, tongue firmly in cheek, his seventy-nine theses on technology and what it means to inhabit a world formed by it. They are pithy, witty, ponderous, and full of life. And over the following weeks, we at the Infernal Machine will take Jacobs’ theses at his provocative best and dispute them. We’ll take three or four at a time and offer our own counter-theses in a spirit of generosity.

So here they are:

Everything begins with attention.

It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”

It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”

It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”

To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.

Attention is not an infinitely renewable resource; but it is partially renewable, if well-invested and properly cared for.

We should evaluate our investments of attention at least as carefully and critically as our investments of money.

Sir Francis Bacon provides a narrow and stringent model for what counts as attentiveness: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

An essential question is, “What form of attention does this phenomenon require? That of reading or seeing? That of writing also? Or silence?”

Attentiveness must never be confused with the desire to mark or announce attentiveness. (“Can I learn to suffer/Without saying something ironic or funny/On suffering?”—Prospero, in Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror)

“Mindfulness” seems to many a valid response to the perils of incessant connectivity because it confines its recommendation to the cultivation of a mental stance without objects.

That is, mindfulness reduces mental health to a single, simple technique that delivers its user from the obligation to ask any awkward questions about what his or her mind is and is not attending to.

The only mindfulness worth cultivating will be teleological through and through.

Such mindfulness, and all other healthy forms of attention—healthy for oneself and for others—can only happen with the creation of and care for an attentional commons.

If our textual technologies promote commentary but we resist it, we will achieve a Pyrrhic victory over our technologies.

“Western literature may have more or less begun, in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, with a lengthy account of a signal crossing space, and of the beacon network through whose nodes the signal’s message (that of Troy’s downfall) is relayed—but now, two and a half millennia later, that network, that regime of signals, is so omnipresent and insistent, so undeniably inserted or installed at every stratum of existence, that the notion that we might need some person, some skilled craftsman, to compose any messages, let alone incisive or ‘epiphanic’ ones, seems hopelessly quaint.”—Tom McCarthy

To work against the grain of a technology is painful to us and perhaps destructive to the technology, but occasionally necessary to our humanity.

“Technology wants to be loved,” says Kevin Kelly, wrongly: But we want to invest our technologies with human traits to justify our love for them.

Therefore when Kelly says, “I think technology is something that can give meaning to our lives,” he seeks to promote what technology does worst.

We try to give power to our idols so as to be absolved of the responsibilities of human agency. The more they have, the less we have.

“In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end.”—George Bernard Shaw in 1907, or Kevin Kelly last week

The cyborg dream is the ultimate extension of this idolatry: to erase the boundaries between our selves and our tools.

Cyborgs lack humor, because the fusion of person and tool disables self-irony. The requisite distance from environment is missing.

It seems not enough for some people to attribute consciousness to algorithms; they must also grant them dominion.

Perhaps Loki was right—and C. S. Lewis too: “I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey.”

Any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.—Alex Tabarrok

Jaron Lanier: “The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart.”

What does it say about our understanding of human intelligence that we think it is something that can be assessed by a one-off “test”—and one that is no test at all, but an impression of the moment?

To attribute intelligence to something is to disclaim responsibility for its use.

The chief purpose of technology under capitalism is to make commonplace actions one had long done painlessly seem intolerable.

Embrace the now intolerable.

Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.

Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to revisit and refresh certain synaptic connections between mind and body.

To shift from typing to (hand)writing to speaking is to be instructed in the relations among minds, bodies, and technologies.

It’s fine to say “use the simplest technology that will do the job,” but in fact you’ll use the one you most enjoy using.

A modern school of psychoanalysis should be created that focuses on interpreting personality on the basis of the tools that one finds enjoyable to use.

Thinking of a technology as a means of pleasure may be ethically limited, but it’s much healthier than turning it into an idol.

The always-connected forget the pleasures of disconnection, then become impervious to them.

“To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’—to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to—that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”—Auden

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The Hedgehog Review is an intellectual journal concerned with contemporary cultural change published three times per year by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.